Avenida de Levante

Levante is the east, the side of the horizon where the sun rises. From the same verb comes the name of the levante wind, warm and damp, blowing in from the Mediterranean toward the peninsula’s eastern coasts. On the Madrid map the word works as a plain geographic reference: the street faces the east of the city. The Avenida de Levante occupies the eastern flank of the Hispanoamérica neighborhood, in Chamartín, where nearly every street recalls a city or country across the Atlantic. Here the name breaks the pattern. Its neighbors —⁠Eucalipto, Tilos, Lirios⁠— speak of trees and flowers, not American geography. That small cluster of plants and compass points betrays an earlier layout, from when this strip of the old Chamartín de la Rosa was land of estates and little garden houses. No record survives of who chose the name or when it was first posted. What remains is the plain sense of the word: a short avenue, barely over two hundred meters, facing where dawn breaks.